I’m having a blast lately toying around with Widget Templates and exploring various techniques for customizing and re-styling content. Earlier today, while recording a marketing video for Sitefinity’s blog feature, I became unhappy with how the blogs look, by default, using the the University Template found in the Sitefinity SDK.
Look at the feature, not the design
I didn’t want the styling and design of the blogs to detract from the Sitefinity features being shown in the video. Consequently, I took at stab at modifying the styling of these blogs.
Here is what I ended up with …
What’s happening here?
There are a few things going on in this design:
- I added some new styling
- I’m using a custom control to truncate blog post content to 100 words
- I added a “Read more” link
Show me the code
Below is the code involved in creating this design.
1. Create a Truncate control for safely truncating your blog post content & HTML.
2. Modify the widget template associated with blog lists in Sitefinity
3. Add the CSS styles in your Theme
That’s it. In general, I’m finding it a lot easier to control the HTML & styling in Sitefinity 4.0.